


Starcrossed

by PetitMinou



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Background shiro/keith - Freeform, Canon Compliant, F/M, She/Her Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, Trans Keith (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 01:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13330461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetitMinou/pseuds/PetitMinou
Summary: There are lots of reasons finding your soulmate wouldn't be as happy as it is in fairytales.  But could anything be worse than finding your soulmate and not being able to tell them who you are?





	Starcrossed

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the Voltron rare pair big bang, beautifully illustrated by the talented [agitatedpigeon](agitatedpigeon.tumblr.com) on tumblr! Running late due to some internet issues but look I finished a thing for once!  
> Also, credit for the idea of Lance's full name goes to [lanceiscuban](https://lanceiscuban.tumblr.com) on tumblr. Thank those lovely mods for helping white people such as myself reduce our shittiness as much as possible!

The second Holt child is born with a soulmark. This isn’t altogether unusual, all it means is that the corresponding soulmate has already been born. The doctors squint at the sapphire scrawl, declare it too small to read yet, and send the parents home with a blue-swaddled bundle.

* * *

When she’s five years old she changes her name to Katie. It’s a decision made on simple logic: there are two other girls named Katie in her kindergarten class so clearly Katie is the best name for a girl. Her parents are supportive, and she goes to school in a dress and short pigtails for the rest of the year.

It’s a week into summer vacation when she realizes that this may have been a mistake.

“What if my soulmate has my old name?” she worries in Matt’s room in the early hours of the morning. “What if they don’t know it’s me because they think I’m a boy? What if they don’t like girls? What if—“

“Katie, go to _bed_ ,” is her brother’s only response, and she creeps back to her own room in a state of deep dissatisfaction. After thinking it over until the first grey light of dawn creeps through her window, she determines that the whole soulmate thing is stupid and she isn’t going to worry about it ever again.

* * *

Her resolution is challenged at the age of ten, when she catches a glimpse of her body in the bathroom mirror. The name etched into her skin is long, running all the way along the base of her ribs from the right side so the left. The first letters of each word have been legible for years, but as she squints at her reflection now she can make out much more than that.

It takes her a minute or two to make out the backwards words, and she dashes off to tell Matt. Despite all her promises to herself the name is burned into her memory from that day on.

Leandro Alejandro Núñez Cuesta Espinosa.

* * *

When she’s fourteen her family is shattered.

Her brother, her best friend, is officially dead. The Garrison hadn’t even bothered to inform them directly, it’s only when reports of the supposed crash hit the news that she hears. Soulmates, and everything else, are suddenly utterly inconsequential.

From the start things don’t add up. The lack of formal notice of the failure of the mission. The refusal to explain how one of the Garrison’s best apparently crashed on a simple science expedition. The fact that there’s no sign of wreckage on the surface of Kerberos. The notable absence of any verifiable rescue attempt.

Her grades plummet, but she doesn’t care. It’s not like she’ll be going back to high school anyway.

* * *

She expects to feel worse about cutting off her hair. Instead she mostly feels bad about _not_ feeling bad as her bathroom sink fills with sandy-brown locks.

The resulting style is messy, but no worse than the hair cuts she’s seen on boys all the time. She actually quite likes the way it frames her face. Maybe this won’t be so bad.

A few minutes later, and she has to admit that it is, in fact, _so bad_.

With some minimal conturing, a binder, and an oversized shirt and shorts, she definitely looks like a boy. The addition of a pair of her brother’s old glasses improves her mood, if only by a bit.

“You’re going to owe me big time for this,” she tells her reflection.

* * *

She breezes through the Garrison entrance exam, would have even if she hadn’t pulled all the answers from their files six months ago. She’s placed as a communications officer, bumped up to work with the second year class.

It’s satisfying, the way Iverson squints down at the classroom, trying to place her. There’s nothing he can do, even if he does figure it out. All of Pidge Gunderson’s documents are in order, from a parental emancipation to elementary school transcripts.

She moves into her dorm room, ignoring a sick kind of itch under her skin. Is this some new incarnation of dysphoria? She’s been presenting as a girl for years, started on T-blockers and then HRT with the onset of puberty, so this kind of jarring disconnect between her body and her identity is new.

The feeling only gets worse as she wanders down to the roster list, and hears her assumed name. “Who the heck is Pidge Gunderson?”

Something is fluttering against the back of her ribs, like butterfly wings trying to escape. What the hell? She’s not nervous, she’d swear she’s not nervous. She’s practiced dropping her voice, speaking from her chest instead of her head, and there’s no reason for her teammates to question her in the first place.

But the feeling doesn’t let up, and she spots Iverson over the pilot’s—Lance’s—shoulder. That’s what it is. Nerves about encountering her enemy one on one in a vulnerable position. She brushes off the boys, walks away, ignores the way her knees turn to water as she rounds the corner.

It’s unlike anything she’s ever felt, but it takes her three more days before she figures out what the hell the problem is. The new team meets outside the simulator, and as soon as she enters the room the bottom drops out of her stomach. The two boys are already there, still loud and slightly irritating.

She’d be less annoyed if her body didn’t feel _wrong_ , shaky and hot and cold all at once. Lance greets her with a grin and an attempted high five. It goes unreturned as she stares, horrified, at the roster behind his head. Right there at the top is her alias, Hunk’s name right below it. But just above hers—

Leandro “Lance” Alejandro Núñez Cuesta Espinosa.

She recovers after a couple seconds, long enough that both of them are staring at her in confusion. Lance in particular looks completely nonplussed by the lack of reaction. Does he not feel it? Hasn’t he noticed? Maybe the bond is unrequited? She tries to be relieved at that possibility, but somehow it makes her feel more alone than ever.

“Just get in there and fly,” she snaps at him, carefully avoiding contact as she ducks into the simulator pod.

* * *

It’s official: the universe hates Pidge’s guts. She’s going to lodge a strongly-worded complaint as soon as she finds an appropriate place. And given that there are flying cat robots that combine into a robot person, there really ought to be a universal complaint department somewhere.

Because now she’s piloting one of said cat robots, along with her possibly-unrequited ( _unwanted_ ) soulmate. Her loud, boisterous, flirtatious, slightly asshole-ish soulmate.

She can ignore it. She has before and she can do it again now. Until she can’t. Until she tries to leave and refuses to acknowledge the sick ache starting low behind her sternum. Until she’s blindsided by pain that isn’t hers and which knocks her sideways to the floor, even as the Castle rocks around her.

It takes her a long time to get up, dizzy and nauseated. The others are already sprinting for the command center, and she scrambles to catch up. Before they get there she already knows what they’re going to find. Coran is bruised, but mostly unhurt. Lance, however…

It feels a bit like she’s been blinded on one side, or lost hearing through half the audible spectrum. She hadn’t even realized she was sensing _Lance_ , his whereabouts throughout the days, but with that extension of her soul cut off she feels disoriented and off-balance.

Shiro reacts faster than she does, checking Lance as the others discuss what to do. Pidge fades into the background, takes a moment to collect herself. She’s always been good at compartmentalizing. She can do it now. Shoving aside her worry, her pain, her panic, locking it down to be unpacked at a later date (or, you know, never), she offers up her only chance at leaving without a second thought.

She wonders later if Lance felt anything like she did, if that’s why he’d snapped out of his coma to save her from Sendak’s crushing grip. For just a split second he’s back in the fringes of her awareness, like a soft blue glow at the corner of her vision. A moment later he lapses back into unconsciousness, and there’s no time to examine anything about what just happened.

After the Castle takes off she manages to corner him in his bedroom. It’s clear that the trip to the healing pods has taken its toll; he’s still stiff and shaky, though he tries to hide it as soon as she knocks on his doorframe. “Hey, Pidge. ‘Sup?”

“Um…” Well, now that she’s here, she has no idea what she really wants to say. Finally she settles on, “Why? Why did you save me? You could have woken up when Shiro was in trouble, but you didn’t. You saved me.”

Lance actually seems to be considering this question for the first time. He pauses halfway through stretching, one arm over his head and the other grasping his fingers behind his back.

It looks utterly ridiculous and is definitely not in the slightest endearing. Pidge looks away.

“I dunno,” he finally says. “I just knew that there was trouble and I had to move. I opened my eyes and saw Sendak had you and I just took the shot. I mean—“ He swings out of his stretch to shoot finger-guns in her direction, winking. “—Anything for a damsel in distress.”

Pidge groans out loud. “Don’t you dare do that. I’m not a damsel. I’m still just Pidge, okay?”

“If you say so.” He shrugs, goes back to his stretching. “Now, ‘just Pidge,’ I need a shower. Out.”

The door slides shut when she steps back, and she takes a moment to lean against the corridor wall. For a moment she’s just a little upset that he had accepted that so easily, hadn’t asked any questions whatsoever. Didn’t even seem curious about her real name.

But then, why would he be? She has no proof that the bond is requited, not really. And even if it is, he probably never even considers the possibility that she could be his soulmate. He might well have a boy’s name somewhere on his body, the birth name she’s more than half forgotten.

This is getting her nowhere. She shakes off the stupid thoughts and heads for the bridge. If she’s going to be stuck in this weird Castle-ship she might as well learn how to fly it.

* * *

Keith finds her in the green lion’s hangar, poking at the cloaking device she’d liberated from the training deck. The labels are in Altean but she’s sure she’ll be able to figure out what each part does, given enough time and experimentation. She’s already considering what she’ll do with it when she has it reduced to component elements. Maybe the green lion will let her mess with its circuits a bit?

She doesn’t pay any attention to her teammate until she gropes blindly for a tool and discovers that he’s sitting on it. She squints at him, still wary after his explosion about her leaving the group. Now is not a good time for another dressing-down, thanks.

A forced smile curls his lips as he hands her the tool (is it a wrench? She’s not entirely sure but it does the job). “I’m sorry about earlier. I’m not always the best with—“ he gestures vaguely, face twisting with frustration, “—you know, people things.”

“It’s okay.” She doesn’t particularly want to talk about this. She’s staying, isn’t she? What more does he want? Okay, maybe she’s still a little bit freaked about the soulmate thing but that’s none of his business.

He makes no move to leave, picking up the screwdriver (maybe? There’s a button on the handle but nothing happened when she tried it) and inspecting it minutely. It looks less like he’s interested and more like he’s desperately avoiding eye contact.

Fine by her. She continues deconstructing the box of intricate wiring, noting which wires connect where and the various components they tie together. It’s amazing, really, Altean tech looks like magic on the surface but when you pull it apart it’s really just incredibly intricate engineering.

The silence stretches for minutes, Keith occasionally taking deep breaths like he’s about to speak and then letting them out again wordlessly. At last Pidge’s patience runs thin. “Look, you have something to say to me. Spit it out. Hunk will be in here any minute and I don’t like getting yelled at in front of other people.”

He looks guilty, setting down the screwdriver. “I’m not going to yell at you! I just…I have a kind of personal question.”

“If it’s about the girl thing I don’t want to hear that either.” She looks up at him, giving him her full attention for the first time.

“No, that’s not it. Um.” He shifts his weight, looks down at his hands. “Your name is Katie, right? Your real name, I mean.”

Her heart gives a single aching thud in her chest, pins and needles buzzing in her fingertips with panic. “Yeah. Why?”  
If it’s possible, he looks even more miserable. “So then, Lance is your soulmate?”

The wrench drops from suddenly nerveless fingers, and he catches it before it hits the ground (stupid ninja boys with stupid fast reflexes), setting it carefully out of her reach.

She shakes, runs a hand through her shorn hair, looks determinedly down at the floor. “What makes you say that?” The tremor in her voice is uncontrollable, in spite of her best efforts.

Keith looks vaguely terrified by her distress, reaching out and then curling in on himself. “I saw his soulmark when we were getting him into the healing pod thing. Shiro told me your name a while ago and I was pretty sure it was you but you don’t act like it, so…”

He trails off, clearly unsure where to go from here.

Pidge heaves in a deep breath, lets it out slowly. She’s so not ready for this conversation. “You haven’t told him, have you?”

Keith shakes his head, eyes wide and a bit mystified.

“Okay,” she says, picking up her wrench before realizing it only emphasizes how unsteady her hands are. “He doesn’t know, and I’m not…I’m not ready to deal with that yet.”

His face softens at her words, and he smiles hesitantly. “I know how that feels, so I can’t really blame you.”

She smiles back, and it feels like the beginning of an understanding. “Thanks.”

There’s another silence, this time a more comfortable one, while she isolates what seems to be the cloaking device’s power source and he continues to mess with the screwdriver. But then something else occurs to her and she straightens up suddenly. “It said Katie?”

Keith drops the tool, startled. “What?”

“Lance’s soulmark. It said Katie?”

“Yes?” It’s a question, not a statement, and she looks down to hide the grin that stretches her cheeks. A glance up under her bangs reveals that Keith looks even more concerned than he did earlier, brows drawn and mouth quirked to one side. She tries to get her face under control before explaining. “It’s just that I changed my name when I was five years old. I didn’t know for sure that I was Lance’s soulmate—I mean, I know he’s mine but I kinda thought it was unrequited—and I didn’t _want_ to know because if he had my birth name then it would be…bad.”

There’s a moment of confusion, then Keith looks—hopeful? She’s not quite sure what his bright eyes and the relaxation of his shoulders means. He rubs his left thumb into the palm of his right hand, apparently struggling with words before he speaks. “Yeah, soulmarks change if you change your name. Shiro’s actually helped me pick mine.”

There’s a lot of information to be unpacked from that statement. She hadn’t been deliberately ignoring her teammates and the way they acted around each other, but interpersonal concerns just weren’t as important as finding her family. Now that she thought about it, Shiro and Keith being soulmates made a lot of sense. As for the rest—

“What do you mean, it helped you pick?”

Keith rubs the back of his neck self-consciously. “Well, I knew I was going to be changing my name, but I couldn’t find one I liked. Shiro suggested Keith almost as a joke, and I kinda liked it. Then he woke up the next morning and his soulmark had changed, so obviously ‘Keith’ is who I was meant to be.”

“Huh.” She turns back to her work, but it feels like a great weight has been lifted from her shoulders. For the first time since she lost her brother, she doesn’t feel quite so alone.

* * *

The last thing she’s expecting at a few minutes past midnight is a knock on her door, and she doesn’t answer for a moment. Then the tapping comes again, more insistent, and she sighs as she closes the holoscreen she’d been reading from. “What?”

The door slides open, and she makes a mental note that she needs to figure out some kind of lock for it. Lance peers in, hair mussed and the blue pajamas hanging loose off one shoulder. “Oh, good, you’re awake.”

“If you weren’t sure I was awake why were you pounding on my door?” She tries to sound annoyed, but he evidently sees through the facade of grumpiness.

“Because I like spending time with my favorite Pidgeon, even if she’s sleeping,” He says, marching into the room like he owns the place and flopping down on the floor next to her bed.

Pidge moves her feet away from his head, squinting at him. “Ignoring the creep factor in that comment, why are you really here?”

There’s a flash of something across his face, something that looks an awful lot like desperate sadness, before he’s smiling again. “I was just thinking,” he replies finally. “I have a really big family, you know. I’m the baby, but I have a bunch of nieces and nephews. I don’t even remember the last time I got a room to myself, and it’s weird not hearing anyone else snoring. But I always used to braid my nieces’ hair at night so it would curl in the morning, and I was wondering if I could mess with yours instead?”

She can’t quite follow all of his logic, exactly what hair has to do with missing his family but if it will make that tightness around his eyes go away there are very few things she wouldn’t be willing to do. “It’s not like there’s a lot to mess with,” she says even as she turns her back on him, crossing her legs and reopening her holoscreen on her lap. “And I don’t have any ties for it.”

Her bed bounces as he launches from the floor to the mattress, lanky legs everywhere. “Don’t worry, I found some. Well, kind of. They’re not exactly like hair ties but it’s what Allura had.”

“Why aren’t you braiding her hair?” she asks, mostly to distract herself from the involuntary shudder that runs up her back when long fingers press gently into her scalp. She’d forgotten how _good_ it feels to have her hair played with, especially without the tense anticipation of a yank from her brother. She’s trying hard to maintain space between their bodies, but the warmth at her back is so temptingly easy to lean into.

“I tried Allura’s hair, but it didn’t really work. There’s too much of it and it’s all…alien-y.” He gestures vaguely with his left hand in the periphery of her vision, the right still clamped around a lock somewhere behind her ear. “I think I put knots in it. She acted like it was fine but the mice seemed mad.”

She snorts inelegantly at the mental image, accidentally pulling at the painful little strands at the back of her neck. “If they didn’t bite you then you haven’t offended them as badly as Coran.”

He lets out a startled laugh, and somehow his legs have ended up against the sides of her hips. She’s incredibly, painfully aware of the weight of them through her shirt, but it’s a _nice_ weight. She actually misses it when he stretches and pats her shoulder, tugging her into the bathroom that adjoins her room to proudly display the small braids now sticking straight out at random in every direction.

“I look like a porcupine.” She wrinkles her nose at her reflection, and Lance makes an offended noise.

She doesn’t miss the quiet, “thanks, Pidge,” as he leaves her room.

* * *

A few weeks later, it’s Pidge who seeks out Lance in the middle of the night. She’d like to claim she doesn’t know how she ended up standing outside his closed door somewhere around midnight, but that would be an outright lie. Out of all the paladins, he’s probably the only one she can talk to about this. Allura might understand, but even though she loves the princess dearly, sometimes confiding can only be done to another human.

He’s awake in there, she can tell, like a faint movement in the back of her mind. Is this how he’d known she wouldn’t be asleep before? If so, he must realize they’re bonded, right?

No, no, the entire point of this is to calm herself down, and considering the implications of her soulmark is not calming. Before she can further freak herself out she reaches up and knocks on his door.

There’s a thud, and a loud grumble accompanying the stomping footsteps across his floor. “Hunk, I told you, I’m not going to do anything—“ He cuts off as the door whooshes open, eyes focused somewhere over her head for just a second. “Oh, it’s you.”

“It’s me.” She shuffles her feet, stuffs her hands as far into her pockets as she can, but determinedly meets his gaze. “I don’t want to be alone right now. Would you—“

She doesn’t get to finish her question because he’s just struck a pose against the doorframe, hip cocked and finger-guns out. “Of course, Pidgeon, I’m your man! Just tell me what you need!” He steps back and makes a sweeping bow to invite her in, the effect somewhat spoiled by the way his bathrobe slides down over his hand and the smear of face cream behind his ear.

“I’m going to the command deck, actually,” she says, backing away from his bedroom and the terrifying level of intimacy it represents. “That’s where I usually go when I can’t sleep.”

“Oh, well then, lead on.” He seems unperturbed by her refusal, following her down the hallway toward the bridge.

At this time of night the room is deserted, the blue glow of stars sweeping past the window the only light. Pidge steps up onto the platform, taps through a sequence of Altean symbols she’d memorized over the last few days. As she gets to the last one she glances up, peering through her bangs at Lance. He’s staring out at the galaxy they’re flying through, starlight sliding across his face. He looks…sad.

With a shaky exhale she hits that final button, reaching out to “grab” the tiny holographic map it opens, and with a sweep of her arms she expands it to fill the entire chamber.

“Whoa.” There’s wonder in his voice, the same she’d heard that first day in the Castle when Allura had showed them the lions and Voltron. Pidge smiles to herself as she seats herself next to the command podium, looking up at the swirl of galaxies above her.

“I like to come in here and pull up the map. I try to see if I can find the constellations me and Matt looked for on earth.” It’s easier to talk about her brother than she’d expected, when she’d sought Lance out, and she keeps her eyes on the stars when he sits down beside her. “My brother’s been my best friend for as long as I can remember. I find his favorites so I can point them out to him when we get him back.”

Lance reaches out, runs a finger through an elliptical galaxy in front of his face. “Can you find Earth in all of this?”

“Just a sec.” She lifts her arms, waits for the Castle to lock onto her hands, then swivels the map around. There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of galaxies, but she spots the distinctive shape of the stars around the Milky Way and spins it to the center of the room, right above their heads, then pulls it down so it hovers right between them.

He smiles, abruptly tipping over backwards to lie prone on the floor. “You know what I miss the most from home? Other than garlic knots, I mean.”

She has no response to that, so instead she lies down too, scooting around so the tops of their heads brush together.

“I miss our stars. You know? I miss seeing the same constellations, I miss learning their names. I always wanted to be an astronaut, so when I was six my mom got me a star chart that projected onto my ceiling.” He reaches up, opens his fingers experimentally, and she can hear the smile in his voice when the map responds to his command by zooming in until they’re inside their galaxy. “Can I help you look?”

“Yeah.” She grins too, gently pushing his hand back down and focusing the map in on that one arm of the Milky Way, that one small yellow star. “I’d like that.”

* * *

It becomes something of a ritual. Every few nights she wanders in to the command deck and lays down across the floor. Sometimes Lance is already there, sometimes he wanders in after she’s already set up the star map. Either way, she’s never alone there anymore, and they rest their heads together as they twist and turn the heavens, looking for familiar shapes.

Sometimes they talk, sometimes they don’t. They have a bit of a laugh when they find the Castle’s locator beacon shining out from the middle star of Orion’s belt. It’s calmer than she’d realized Lance was capable of being. She ignores the way her hands sometimes shake, pretends it doesn’t happen when she catches sight of his face, lips curled contentedly and eyes reflecting back starlight.

“Do you have a soulmark?” He asks abruptly one night.

She freezes, pushes down her panicked reaction and gives the universal map a swirl. “Yeah, I do.”

There’s a very long silence, which she spends spinning the map around in a cyclone of light and movement.

“Do you ever wonder where your soulmate is?”

This is drifting into very dangerous territory, but Pidge isn’t sure how to redirect it. She’s not entirely positive she wants to. “Not really,” she answers honestly. “I have to find my family. That’s what’s most important right now. I can worry about soulmates later.”

He seems to accept that, reaching up to stop her hands and freezing the stars in place. “I always wanted to find my soulmate, but I didn’t know where to start looking. I always figured that if I got into the Garrison I’d find her, because soulmates are supposed to fit together, right? So my soulmate must want to go to the stars just as much as I did.”

She could tell him right now. She could tell him what she knows but the butterfly wings behind her ribs are back, fluttering frantically and making every breath feel empty. “I’m sorry,” is what she finally forces out.

“Don’t be.” He shifts behind her, rolling over, and she can see him at the fringes of her vision, looking down at her face. “I think I found something better. I think I was too focused on fate and destiny and stuff like that to see what was in front of me.”

It sounds like something he’s been preparing for a while, and she can easily imagine him practicing it in the mirror, cracking voice and all. He’s above her now, blue irises glinting in the faint light and gaze fixed on her own eyes. She’s shaking.

“Please don’t look at me like that,” she whispers.

He scoots back immediately, out of her space, and she squeezes her eyes shut. _What am I doing?_

There’s no reply, nothing verbal anyway, but he settles back above her head, and sets about fixing the map she’d mixed up in her nervousness. She lets out a long, shaking exhale, reaches up to wrap a hand around his longer fingers. “Maybe,” she whispers, pulling his hand down and squeezing it. “Maybe.”

His thumb strokes her palm while he continues to manipulate the map with his other arm, and it feels like understanding.

* * *

Shiro’s disappearance hits all of them hard. It’s most obvious in Keith, as his efforts to find his soulmate grow ever more desperate. No one has the heart to tell him that any life support system would have given out after a week, and that his trips out to the debris field can only find grief.

Pidge spends her days in Green’s hangar, fiddling with everything and nothing. Hunk is far better at dealing with the short tempers and frayed nerves all around. He makes sure everyone eats, sleeps, occasionally gets up and stretches legs gone stiff with tension. It’s clear that he doesn’t expect to find Shiro alive, and Pidge can’t bring herself to spend more than a few minutes in his company.

Her stargazing dates with Lance increase in frequency until they’re spending hours of every night lying on the platform, moving on from the basics like the dippers and Orion to more difficult to spot constellations. Sometimes they just make up their own, finding their own shapes and stories in the endless galaxies.

One night that devolves into a good-natured argument over the merits of two possible player characters in their favorite game series (no matter what Lance says, Pidge holds out that bow-sniping is cheating, while stealthily backstabbing is just _good sense_ ). They’re sitting up, face to face, knees of their crossed legs touching, stars around them forgotten in favor of insulting each other’s play styles.

“What’re you going to do when someone gets too close for you to shoot, hmm?” she asks, giggling when he scrunches his face up in frustration. “Will you hit them with your stick with a string on it?”

“Har har, very funny.” He tries to look frustrated but a smile keeps flashing through. “Obviously I don’t let anyone get close to me, because I have long enough legs to get away. What’s your plan, shorty? Ducking when they turn around so they look straight over your head?”

She gasps in mock outrage, but starts laughing halfway through and just makes a disgruntled little squeaking noise while she’s trying to get her breath back. He’s laughing too, leaning in and resting his forehead on her shoulder. Somehow her elbows have ended up braced on his thighs, chin hooked over his shoulder, settling into the comfort of physical contact with a sigh that feels like it reinvigorates her whole body.

Lance uncrosses his legs in order to scoot closer, enough so that he can wrap his arms around her shoulders and pull her into a hug. They sit like that, comfortable and whole, for a few minutes longer. Her eyes drift open, slowly focusing on one cluster of stars behind him.

“I found one for you,” she murmurs, leaning pack and nudging him to turn around. When he doesn’t seem to see it she leans forward to trace the outlines of the nebula that forms a fluke, an arc of stars, galaxies that make fins. “It’s a dolphin. See?”

A shaky breath pushes his shoulder against hers, and he reaches out to follow her fingers, drawing the outline of the leaping animal in midair. “It’s perfect.”

Quite abruptly he’s facing her again, smile still barely there, and she meets his gaze. The air feels somehow hot and viscous, almost like everything is moving in slow motion. His gaze flicks down to her mouth for a single instant, and she sees the moment he nervously licks his lips.

“I’d really like to kiss you right now.” It comes out in a rush, and it’s not at all a surprise.

Her heart is thundering in her ears, so fast the beats seem indistinguishable, thudding against the back of her sternum. Her mouth has suddenly gone very, very dry, and a small, slightly panicky part of her mind wonders if he’ll be able to tell.

She doesn’t think of saying no. The urge is nothing new, but now feels like exactly the right time to give in to it. She swallows, a loud click against the bass line of her pulse, and responds. “I’d like that.”

It’s chaste, inexperienced on both their parts. She notes that her lips are drier than his, more chapped, but he certainly doesn’t seem to mind, from the way his breath fans against her cheek and his hands clench hard into her shirt. Her heart has somehow kicked further into overdrive, almost dizzying, but she definitely feels it skip when he shifts his head just a bit and presses more. The sweet scent of his face cream is invading her senses, almost like it’s seeping into her skin, and she’s suddenly very conscious of the wet line at the seam of his lips. It’s…tempting.

She pulls away slowly, savoring the contact as it ends, eyes that she didn’t realize she’d closed coming open. He’s already gazing at her, stunned, but as she watches he slowly reaches up to touch his own mouth, lightly, almost disbelieving.

“Well, that was fun.” He doesn’t sound as nonchalant as he probably thinks he does, and she grins at him.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it was,” she responds, wavering between the urge to kiss him again and the eye contact that seems somehow more important than anything right now. It’s like a weight has been lifted from her body, her stomach unclenching and shoulders loosening when she hadn’t even realized they’d been tensed up.

It’s a long time before they go back to stargazing, now with their hands entwined where they rest next to Pidge’s head. The walk back to the sleeping quarters is comfortably quiet, and she tugs him to a halt outside her door.

She has to stand up on her tiptoes to reach his mouth, but he leans into her kiss so that she’s not craning her neck anymore. She could try for more, dart her tongue out and taste that temptation, but she doesn’t. For tonight, a simple good night kiss is enough.

* * *

Her reunion with Matt is everything she could have hoped for, and she forgets about everything else until they’re halfway back to the Castle. He’s pacing around behind her in the cockpit, cooing over little bits and bobs of tech that he finds, picking at the improvements she’s made on the Altean design. Occasionally he whispers, “I can’t believe… _my little sister_ …a paladin…” seemingly more to himself than to her.

If she didn’t know her brother so well she would have been startled when his hands land on her shoulders, his shaggy head shoving into her peripheral vision. “How do you fly this thing? There’s so many controls. Do you have individual command of each leg or do you just tell it what you want and it works out the limbs itself? What would happen if I—“

She slaps his hand away from the laser triggers, leaving the lion to pilot herself as she restrains her over-enthusiastic sibling. “ _Don’t touch_. And if you must know, it’s a bit of both. I can control what she does with her claws or I can leave her to do what she needs to. But watch this.”

An asteroid drifts into view on the screens, and with a quick twist of the hand controls and a tweak of the trigger Matt had been reaching for she sends Green into a spin. The tail laser flashes, blowing up the small rock on their way by. Matt whoops and yells, far more excited by the small explosion than he really should be. “Katie, that’s amazing.”

_Katie._

At the sound of her name her heart plummets to somewhere under her stomach, beating sickeningly hard and slow. She trusts Keith and Shiro, she honestly does. They’ve known her primarily as Pidge, they’re not going to slip up and give her away. Matt, on the other hand, has known her as Katie for most of both of their lives, it’s what he calls her when he’s serious and they’re in a _war_ , he’s bound to give her away sooner or later—

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps, voice high with distress.

Matt steps back, clearly startled. “Well, that’s a first,” he mutters, hands up and placating. “I thought you never wanted me to call you Pidge ever again.”

She sighs, hauls back on the controls to bring Green to a halt, looks up at him shakily. “I found my soulmate.”

“What does that have to do with—“ he doesn’t make the connection, just fully recognizes what she said, and his face lights up. “You did? Katie, that’s great!”

“No. No it’s not.” She rubs her eyes under the visor of her helmet, blinking away tears. “He doesn’t know.”

He processes this for a second before realization creeps across his face. “He doesn’t know your real name. You told him something else.”

“They think my name is Pidge,” she whispers. “They haven’t asked…I want him to like me because of _me_ , not because he thinks he has to because I’m his soulmate! Right now we can just hang out. He braids my hair and looks at my tech and asks if he can kiss me every time and I don’t want to lose this because of stupid names on our skin.”

“Oh, Katie.” Her brother yanks her into a hug, lets her gasp out her tears against his shoulder, rubs her back through the Paladin armor (she can’t really feel it, but it’s the thought that counts). After a few minutes she calms down, wipes her eyes, and manages a watery smile. Matt returns it, reaches out to knock her helmet askew. “I won’t tell him if you don’t want me to. But you know you can’t hide this forever.”

“I know.” She doesn’t say anything else, just turns back to the controls and pushes Green homeward a little bit faster.

* * *

Their return from Naxzela is somewhat less than triumphant. Between Lotor’s sudden defection and what all of them know Keith tried to pull, everyone's on edge. The rebel ships reconvene on the Castle of Lions along with Voltron, and most of the fighters make it to the command center at the same time.

The five Paladins instantly converge on Keith. Pidge sees his eyes go wide in the few seconds between their entrance and the impact of Hunk in a hug that’s more like a football tackle. Everyone is talking at once, yelling, and she doesn’t think she’s ever heard Lance’s voice go that high. Shiro hangs back, but there’s a tremor in the arms crossed across his chest. It’s obvious that Keith knows he’s in trouble, and he pales when he meets his soulmate’s eyes.

Pidge gets in a good punch to his shoulder, and an order to “never do anything like that ever again!” before the door opens again. Olia’s crew stampedes in, the captain herself tugging the bound Lotor through at the back. The Galra prince looks strangely small, skinny even, but Pidge doesn’t get a good look.

“Katie!” Matt very nearly screams, sprinting across the intervening distance and almost knocking her over as he squeezes her so hard that her ribs creak in protest. “Coran said something about heximite and a bomb and that freaky ship and we couldn’t figure out how to stop that thing—“

A thump behind her catches her attention, and there’s a short moment of confusion before realization hits with nauseating clarity. Matt seems to figure it out as well, as his arms gingerly drop from her shoulders and he steps away slowly.

She can’t bring herself to turn around, but any hope that Lance hadn’t heard or hadn’t made the connection is dashed. “Katie?” He sounds shocked, almost blank, and she briefly, hysterically wonders if this can work out. Maybe he’ll just be happy to learn her real name, that there isn’t any awkward first meeting or break up in their future? Yeah, because the universe is just that nice.

Shiro clearly catches on to what’s going on, stepping away from where Allura and Hunk are still alternately berating and hugging Keith, and out of Pidge’s field of vision. Hurried footsteps are arrested within a few feet, and she can hear the murmur of Shiro’s voice but can’t make out the words. Finally she turns, watches him hold back a sickly-pale Lance. His helmet is lying on the floor, almost under Keith’s feet, and Hunk is the one to slowly bend to pick it up.

“Lance?” Her voice sounds foreign in her ears, choking on the butterflies now in her throat.

His eyes meet hers over Shiro’s shoulder for just an instant. She steps back, too numb to say anything else, and he looks back at their leader. “I need to leave. Right now. I’ll come back but right now I need to be…not here.”

Shiro lets him go, watches as Hunk trots after him with an unreadable look back at the group. Allura doesn’t seem to have really followed any of what happened, and she starts a whispered conversation with a pair of the mice. Keith, left alone in the wake of more immediate drama, steps gingerly around Shiro and pulls Pidge into something like an affectionate headlock. “At least I’m not the only one in trouble now,” he whispers, and she manages a shaky laugh.

Matt returns to her other side, slinging a supportive arm around her shoulders, and everyone seems to simultaneously remember the elephant in the room. Allura draws herself up as she strides over to Lotor, regal attitude in every movement, and Pidge gratefully turns her attention to the business of saving the universe.

* * *

Lance doesn’t speak to her for almost a week. She can’t really blame him. It doesn’t take Hunk seeking her out and telling her so in no uncertain terms to know that she fucked up. Badly.

“You have no idea how long he’s been looking for his soulmate,” Hunk hisses to her, keeping his voice down so no one in the neighboring rooms can hear them. “He spent _weeks_ freaking out at me because he was crushing on you and thought he was somehow betraying his soulmate. You’re both my friends and I love you and he told me I wasn’t allowed to be mean to you but you need to make this right.”

She nods, curled into the corner of her bed, as small as she can get, the holopad she’d been reading when he came in abandoned by her feet. “I know, I know. I don’t know how.”

“Figure it out.”

She’s never heard Hunk sound so harsh. He doesn’t stomp or slam out of her room, but it’s obvious how angry he is.

Worse, Keith has clearly taken Pidge’s side in this, and it’s causing friction between the entire team. It doesn’t help that he and Shiro haven’t spoken since the Naxzela incident. Allura and Coran seem to be at a total loss to deal with this particular human peculiarity, and after a couple disastrous attempts at mediation they evidently decide to let their paladins deal with it themselves.

Pidge spends the sixth day in her bedroom, with a few breaks to hunch over the toilet in her adjoining bathroom. It seems like her body is determined to reject everything she’s eaten over the past year, and she continues heaving long after she stops bringing up anything but bile. Keith finds her in there, a miserable sweaty heap almost drowning in the green bathrobe.

“How did I get the flu in space?” she grumbles, cheek pressed against the cold metal of the wall. “The only other human we’ve been around is Matt and he’s been out here a year so there shouldn’t be any viruses that affect humans. Is this an alien virus? Am I the first human to get alien flu?”

Keith has the audacity to laugh at her pain, and she finds the strength to give him the middle finger. His eyes cross to focus on the finger in his face, but he doesn’t stop smiling. “You don’t have alien flu. Go talk to Lance.”

“Not helping,” she growls, turning her head to cool her other cheek.

There’s no warning but an exaggerated eye roll, and then he scoops her up, robe and all. She squawks indignantly, but doesn’t protest further. She has no doubt he’d set her down if she really struggled, but at this point she doesn’t particularly want to. She actually feels better already, the nausea that’s been plaguing her all morning fading just a bit.

They can hear the commotion in Lance’s room long before they get there, and she groans and tucks her face into Keith’s shoulder. Hunk sounds no happier than he had with her.

“Look, both of you are hurting. Get out there, go talk to her. It’ll be fine.”

“No it won’t! I don’t want to! And I stink anyway so I’m not going anywhere. So there.”

She laughs weakly at the petulant tone of his voice, easily picturing his pout. Then Keith is dropping her on her feet with a grunt, and the door slides open as soon as they’re in range of the sensor. “Trust me, you’ll feel better if you talk to him.”

When she stumbles over the threshold, propelled by Keith’s unexpected push (traitor), Hunk stands up from the end of Lance’s bed. He looks from her guilty face to his best friend, who seems determined to avoid eye contact with either of them. Hunk leaves without a word, and clearly Keith has stepped back because the door shuts with a whoosh seconds later.

There’s a very long, very uncomfortable silence. Lance is apparently completely focused on his fingernails. Pidge stands in the middle of the room, hands clenched in her pockets, studying the floor.

She’ll have to be the first to speak up, she knows that. She’s the one who messed up. That doesn’t make it any easier to find the breath to do so. A closer look at him makes her feel even worse. He looks as sick as she feels, flushed and shaky. That’s what she needs to finally repair the disconnect between her brain and her mouth.

“I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t look up, but his shoulders hunch defensively. Refusing to be cowed, she swallows to wet her suddenly dry throat and continues. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. I should have told you back at the Garrison, or when we first formed Voltron, or when…” Her voice dies on the attempt to quantify their relationship, and she elects not to try. “At first I didn’t want it. I really was just trying to find my family and get home. Soulmate stuff needed to wait. But then I realized that you like me, without knowing we were soulmates, and I…I was selfish. I wanted you to like me for me, not because of my name or because you felt like you had too.”

He finally looks at her, and she ducks her head, unable to face him.

“And I don’t think I can live up to what you expected your soulmate to be like. You probably spent a lot of time thinking about it and you probably didn’t picture a short girl with messy hair who spends all her time messing with computers and hasn’t ever thought about soulmates—”

“Pidge.”

She chokes, clamps trembling hands behind her back. A peek up under her hair tells her that he’s not quite smiling at her, but he’s not looking so queasy anymore. He reaches out and pats the bed next to him, a clear invitation, and she very gingerly sits down.

“Do you know how much time I spent over the last couple weeks whining at Hunk about how much I wished you were my soulmate?” When she flinches away his hand comes up to grasp her shoulder, keeping her in place. “I honestly have no idea how I didn’t figure it out sooner, especially since I’m pretty sure both Keith and Shiro know.”

This time she winces, but doesn’t try to get up, and his hand trails down her arm to curl around her fingers. At the skin to skin contact a jolt runs through her, though it’s not a bad feeling at all. In fact, her lungs seem to fully inflate for the first time in days. He sits up a bit straighter, and she finally looks him in the face.

“I’m still mad,” he says bluntly, but his hand on hers is gentle. “You should have told me. But I shouldn’t have pushed before I knew, either. I knew I was setting us both up to get hurt but I did it anyway. Truce?”

Now he smiles, and she returns it, leaning over to nudge him lightly with her shoulder. “Truce.”

They lapse into silence again, but this time it’s a comfortable silence. Pidge tucks her knees up and wraps her free arm around them, staring into space. It’s a few minutes before Lance speaks again. “Does this mean we can start over with the whole soulmates thing? And do it right this time?”

She smiles. “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

He lets go abruptly, scrambling up to his knees before, once again, shooting finger guns at her. “You must be a star, because I’m caught in your orbit.”

“Oh my god.” Her pull away is halfhearted at best, especially because she just choked on her own spit. “I take it back, we’re not doing this again.”

Still, she doesn’t scoot away from him, and when he pouts up at her she gives in easily. He wraps his arms around her in a hug that’s just a shade too tight, but they have time to work on this. There will be plenty of nights of stargazing to figure it out.


End file.
